Love and Passion: The Secular and the Spiritual in the Leyden Love Letter (Leyden, UB, LTK 216) and the 'Söldner Liebesgruß' (Karlsruhe, Generallandesarchiv, 66/10264)

Abstract

The rhymed love letter is a hybrid genre, positioned between the real love letter in prose and fictional love poems and love songs. In Dutch a handful of these has been transmitted from ca. 1400 onwards. This article is centered around the oldest one, the bifolium Leyden, UB, LTK 216, illustrated by a spectacular but never correctly understood gilded illustration. An analysis of the text reveals an amalgamation of sacred and profane elements, with similarities to Middle Dutch poems celebrating the mystical union between the loving soul and the crucified Christ, and correspondences with parts of the secular love poem 'Van Minnen' in the Manuscript van Hulthem (ca. 1400). A comparable mixture of the sacred and profane is also found in the short love letter known as the 'Söldner love greeting' (before 1387). Love letters were probably not written by serious lovers, but were playful pastimes by well-versed scribes; they are clear evidence of the interchangeability of sacred and profane love poetry in the Middle Dutch area around 1400.